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I am pleased the demo/rebuild has been postponed through summer if for no other reason than it gives me somewhere to bring my child on the weekends in miserable weather – she LOVES that library. Other than that, I say bring on the new design.

On a new-libraries tangent… I was driving up Rhode Island Avenue recently and was really disappointed when I saw the under-construction Woodridge Neighborhood Library. It looks like a prison — few windows, and the ones that are there are tall and narrow like you’d expect in a castle fortress.
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I like the design of the Watha T. Daniel/Shaw library — a shame the Woodridge one couldn’t have been more like that.

Sad to see once again a waste of great space near a Metro with a single story single use building. All the new libraries are horrible. Sure, nice glassy designs, but drastically fewer books, and ridiculous bookshelves that are only waist-high. It is CRAZY!

Friendship Heights is the worst. The CD audiobook shelves, are actually ON the floor. The users (primarily not teenagers) literally have to kneel down and lay their head on the carpet to see the titles on the shelves.

Chevy Chase library, still happily not renovated, has wonderfully designed bins for CD audiobooks, plus regular, tall stacks where one can browse comfortably.

Actually, keeping the scale of the area is better urbanism than building something else. Sadly, despite its plain design, there’s nothing much wrong with this building, besides decades of neglect. The proposed new building is rather ugly and despite a,I got something of a specialty of libraries, Perkins has designed so eapectacularly bad ones.